The Labyrinth
The Labyrinth is the vast, inescapable maze built beneath the palace of Knossos on Crete, designed by the craftsman Daedalus at the command of King Minos to hold the Minotaur, a creature with a bull's head on a man's body.
Sections on this page
In Practice
The Minotaur is itself the product of an earlier offense: Minos had failed to sacrifice a bull Poseidon sent him, and in punishment the god made Minos's wife Pasiphaë fall in love with the animal, with Daedalus building a wooden cow to let her conceive; the Minotaur is the result, and the Labyrinth is built specifically to contain what that punishment produced. Athens paid a periodic tribute of youths and maidens, sent into the Labyrinth to be devoured by the Minotaur, as the price of a war Minos had won against the city. Theseus, son of the Athenian king, volunteers to go among the tribute intending to kill the Minotaur, and succeeds only with outside help: Ariadne, Minos's daughter, falls in love with him and gives him a ball of thread to unwind as he enters, so that after killing the Minotaur he can find his way back out of a maze that was otherwise designed to make return impossible. Daedalus himself was later imprisoned in the Labyrinth by Minos, along with his son Icarus, precisely because he had helped Ariadne betray the maze's secret - which is the reason the two escape by flying with wings of feathers and wax rather than by any land or sea route, tying the Labyrinth directly to the separate story of Icarus's fall. The Labyrinth's name has outlasted the specific myth: "labyrinthine" now describes any structure or situation so intricate that navigating it without a guide is effectively impossible, a generalization from a maze built for one particular monster into a word for structural complexity itself, independent of Minos, the Minotaur, or Crete.
Why was the Labyrinth built?
King Minos had Daedalus build it specifically to contain the Minotaur, a bull-headed creature born from his wife Pasiphaë after Poseidon punished Minos for failing to sacrifice a bull the god had sent him. The maze's purpose was not decorative or defensive in the ordinary sense; it existed to hide and hold a creature Minos could not simply kill without compounding the offense that produced it.
Apollodorus, Library 3.1.4
Why did Athens send youths into the Labyrinth?
Athens had lost a war against Crete, and as tribute Minos demanded a periodic sacrifice of Athenian youths and maidens sent into the Labyrinth to be killed by the Minotaur. The exact number and interval vary across sources, but the tribute functions consistently as the price of Athens's earlier defeat, which is what gives Theseus's later intervention its political as well as personal stakes.
Apollodorus, Library 3.15.8
How did Theseus find his way out of the Labyrinth?
Ariadne, King Minos's daughter, fell in love with Theseus when he arrived among the tribute and gave him a ball of thread before he entered. He tied one end near the entrance and unwound it as he went, which let him retrace his path back out after killing the Minotaur - a maze built to prevent return defeated by a method that did not depend on solving its layout at all.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.169-176
Why was Daedalus himself imprisoned in the Labyrinth?
Minos learned that Daedalus had given Ariadne the idea of the thread, betraying the one design feature that made the Labyrinth actually inescapable, and imprisoned Daedalus along with his son Icarus inside it, or in a tower, depending on the source, as punishment. Because Minos controlled the sea and land routes off Crete, Daedalus's only remaining option was to build wings and escape by air, which is the direct link between the Labyrinth story and Icarus's fall.
Apollodorus, Epitome 1.12-1.13
Was the Labyrinth a real place?
The palace at Knossos, excavated in the early twentieth century, is a genuinely vast and architecturally complex structure, and some scholars have proposed its maze of corridors and storerooms as the origin of the myth, though this connection is an inference from archaeology rather than something the ancient literary sources themselves state. The mythological Labyrinth as Apollodorus and Ovid describe it should be treated as a literary structure independent of that archaeological question.
Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.159-168
Where This Appears
Referenced By
Sources
- Apollodorus, Library 3.1.4
- Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.159-176